Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Tuesday November 27, 2007

9 miles 1:13 Gallagator-Sourdough Trail out and back sz11 250sAnother solid comeback run. It was a real winter run today; lots of wind and blowing snow and the temp was no higher than 20 degrees. This run is ever-so-slightly uphill on the way back and thus, ever-s0-slightly downhill on the way back, which makes for typically feeling a lot better the second half.

I didn't feel great physically today, but my ankle was mostly fine. Yesterday it was completely pain-free, but today I could feel just the tiniest little murmurings of acheing in there. However, it never got any worse over the course of the run, so I was happy with how things went. I iced my entire foot/ankle in a cooler full of snow/ice water for 20 minutes right after the run, and my ankle never gave me any trouble the rest of the day. Hopefully I can keep it manageable and keep getting in solid runs.

Today in the lab I was finally able to cut a couple of my rock core samples so that hopefully we can get them all sent off to be cut into thin-sections by the end of the semester. Figuring out how to cut a "horizontal" slice out of each of these 1-inch cores of quartz has been the problem-solving lesson of the semester for me. When each core was drilled, the drill wasn't necessarily directly perpendicular to the surface of the rock face it was drilling into, so, for the thin-sections (a 30 micron slice of rock glued to a glass plate and looked at under a petrographic microscope. For reference, a human hair is about 70 microns thick) we want a slice of the core that would be in a plane parallel to the surface of the rock that it was taken from.

This has proven to be a much more "tinkering-intensive" procedure than we'd planned. After having to engineer (and construct, in the machine shop) a new attachment for the slow-speed rock-saw arm, extend the samples with several different epoxy molds, make my own molds out of PVC pipe, etc., etc., etc. it finally seems that I'm getting close to getting them all cut. As my advisor, Colin, said today: "Geez, I guess it would've been a lot easier if we'd just drilled the samples vertically this summer..." I guess so.

The ideal in the Lieh-Tzu is a state, not of withdrawal, but of heightened perceptiveness and responsiveness in an undifferentiated world. My mind concentrated and my body relaxed, bones and flesh fused completely, I drifted with the wind East or West, like a leaf from a tree or a dry husk, and never knew whether it was the wind that rode me or I that rode the wind. -The Book of Lieh-Tzu